If a monster hurricane like Katrina were to strike a city like New Orleans today, experts believe the federal government would be ill-equipped to respond.
“I think we’re not prepared for another Katrina and we’re getting less prepared every day as there’s talk of disassembling FEMA,” Dr. Irwin Redlener, founding director and senior advisor for the Columbia Climate School’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness, told The Independent.
After Katrina struck, Redlener spent months in New Orleans working with the state’s health department on where to place medical assets in the region. So, President Donald Trump’s threats to dismantle FEMA is what he calls “the bottom line.”
Earlier this week, as the 20 year anniversary of the costliest hurricane in U.S. history — nearly 1,400 people were killed — approached, Federal Emergency Management Agency employees wrote an open letter warning Congress that the administration’s actions could risk a Katrina-level disaster.
“Our shared commitment to our country, our oaths of office, and our mission of helping people before, during, and after disasters compel us to warn Congress and the American people of the cascading effects of decisions made by the current administration,” the more than 190 employees said in a document called the “Katrina Declaration.”
Only 35 people signed their names to the letter. They were later put on administrative leave, according to reports.
“I am not surprised that some of the same bureaucrats who presided over decades of inefficiency are now objecting to reform; including many who worked under the Biden Administration to turn FEMA into the bureaucratic nightmare it is today,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem told Fox News Digital on Thursday. Her department leads FEMA.
“I refuse to accept that FEMA red tape should stand between an American citizen suffering and the aid they desperately need,” Noem added.
FEMA, the nation’s top disaster relief agency, was criticized over its response to Katrina and the actions of its leadership — but today the threat of hurricane disaster is greater than ever, thanks to the impacts of human-caused climate change and the actions of the Trump administration.
Storms are stronger and intensify faster in a warming world. The recent Hurricane Erin side-swiped the East Coast last week, but was one of the fastest strengthening storms on record.
The Trump administration, which has denied the role of climate change and the science behind it, spearheaded mass layoffs at the National Weather Service that forecasters warned could have dangerous side effects during hurricane season and for years to come.
Disasterology author Dr. Samantha Montano was a junior in high school when Katrina hit. She volunteered to rebuild houses in New Orleans with fellow students in the aftermath, and went on to become an associate professor of emergency management at Massachusetts Maritime Academy.
Now, she says 20 years of FEMA’s post-Katrina progress have been unraveled, leaving it less prepared to respond to a major disaster than it was in 2005.
“I have not seen anything from FEMA that would suggest that the agency is operating more effectively today than it was in May,” Dr. Samantha Montano said in an emailed statement referring to an internal memo cautioning that the agency was not ready for this season.
Later on social media, Montano wrote that while FEMA had not been eliminated yet, much of the agency has been brought to a “standstill.”
“There’s a difference between those two things but when you’re standing on the foundation of your house trying to get some help they feel largely the same,” she noted.
A spokesperson for the agency told The Independent that its current leadership, namely Noem and Acting Administrator David Richardson, are “turning the page on the old way of doing business” and disaster response “bogged down by red tape, inefficiency, and a one-size-fits-all approach that left too many Americans waiting for help that came too late.”
They pointed out that FEMA is still processing claims from Katrina and said the administration aimed to build “something better.”
Noem later said she was “working so hard to eliminate FEMA as it exists today,” telling Fox News Digital she wanted to “streamline [it] into a tool” that is beneficial for Americans in crisis.
“The Trump administration is committed to building a FEMA that works for the American people — not for Washington bureaucrats,” noted the statement from the agency. “States know best the unique challenges they face, and FEMA is ready to enable them with effective disaster recovery resources.”
Bill Gentry, a professor at the University of North Carolina who worked for the state’s Division of Emergency Management, said he believed the agency and their staff are ready for hurricanes and that “hasn’t changed,” but that “there’s going to be an adjustment.”
So far, there hasn’t been any communication on what that adjustment might entail, he said, other than requiring state and local authorities to do more.
It could mean that EMAC, the national agreement that allows states to request and receive assistance from others, could be affected. FEMA reimburses the cost of that aid now, but there could be changes to the system if FEMA won’t cover costs anymore.
“I think that’s where more angst comes in because we just don’t have a full understanding of how long is it going to be for federal resources to be approved, if they are approved,” he said.
Earlier this year, the administration was slow to respond to disaster aid requests. In several cases, requests were denied, including following tornadoes in Arkansas, a bomb cyclone in Washington state, flooding in West Virginia, and North Carolina’s Hurricane Helene.
On a state and local level, response to these events has been swift – especially in more hazard-prone areas. But Gentry noted that western North Carolina has just received a fourth of its total recovery funding approved by FEMA nearly a year after the storm.
In Louisiana, which is often the target of hurricanes and other storms churning across the Gulf of Mexico, Montano said that a Katrina-like event hitting today would have a “much better” outcome because of extensive changes to the metro’s levee system.
But every situation is different. Not every local system can afford resources, and some states don’t have as many disasters.
“Every community that has a major disaster benefits from having the experience and expertise and coordination capacity of FEMA as it is,” Redlener said.
To Redlener, politics have influenced a key service for the American public. FEMA provides critical money for families and businesses recovering from hurricanes.
“In many ways, it feels like we’ve gone backwards. And that is a fundamental concern for disaster preparedness in general in the United States,” he said.
